Carlos Pardo

Workers On A Bus

The night disolves in a barracks, we travel toward the intimacey of the roundabout. It isn’t decadence, but rather cooking with refined ingredients. It is the moment prior to dawn’s baking. One supported by the other, smelling each other, without retaining anything from this daily recognition, I know you will miss me at another time, on another street. Perhaps the least premeditated uniform and the romantic nature of leisure. If being alone is the price of this equality, balsamic modesty emerges on the trip, body to body. A streetlight shines on a blind man. There is something fascinating and crude in keeping afloat. Protect the embers of the house’s breathing. We shelter each other to be only one. Every day your cheekbone is a custom that I can neither love nor let decompose, that would warn with its loss when it could no longer live this normality.

Translated by Curtis Bauer “Workers On A Bus” is from Echado a perder [Spoiled] (Madrid, Visor, 2007); this English translation appeared in The Dirty Goat #25.